Truth is a perennial topic in philosophy. Even so, some philosophers seem always eager and ready to take up this topic anew, alive, and ever-optimistic about possessing the truth about truth and ever-dedicated to converting others to their own view. On the other hand, other philosophers appear exhausted or annoyed by a topic that apparently won't go away and hope to inhabit—or imagine themselves already living in—some post-truth paradise from which they periodically mail “wish you were here” postcards. Still others seem simply otherwise and elsewhere occupied, very busy, without time for truth. The overall result of all this is clear enough: Truth is a site of perennial difference, disagreement, and contestation. And as such it may be a poster child for the practice of philosophy.This is not merely or even principally a dispute about a definition or a battle over who is empowered to stipulate a term's meaning. It frequently is that, but it is more than that. As William James observed more than a century ago, “Truth as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their ‘agreement’ with ‘reality.’” Philosophical quarrel begins, James continued, “only after the question is raised as to what may precisely be meant by the terms ‘agreement,’ and what by the term ‘reality,’ when reality is taken as something for our ideas to agree with.”1 Any effort, that is, to determine the nature of truth clearly raises central issues in both epistemology and metaphysics: Epistemology: concerns about the relations of truth to facts, evidence, justification, and knowledge; matters of epistemic authority and methods and communities of inquiry; and issues about truths as discovered or made, singular or plural, eternal or temporal, and knowable or not.Metaphysics: problems about the nature of reality as the object or basis or ideal limit condition of truth; concerns about the ability of language to capture, represent, or point to reality; and metaphilosophical issues about whether and how to resolve metaphysical disagreements without begging the question by making metaphysical assumptions at the outset—whether explicitly, implicitly, disguised, or unknowingly. Philosophical issues about the nature of truth are not simply epistemological and metaphysical: Aesthetics: issues concerning truth and art; the role of truth in expression, creativity, and imagination; the nature and reach of artistic responsibility, aesthetic experience, and multiple kinds of knowledges and truths.Ethics: concerns about the relation of truth to the normative generally and about the ethical value of truth in particular and concrete contexts; the role of truth in good lives; the place of truth in moral responsibility and moral rights; and the relation between truth (understood as a good) and morality (understood as goods).Religion: spiritual concerns about the nature of truth and its relation to revelation and human finitude and to divinity; the relation of truth to faith; the relation of truth to mystery and ineffability; and understandings of truth in contexts of revelation, inspiration, and confession.Education: issues concerning the expansion of learned habits of inquiry that produce truth; the relation between truth and educational growth; the social transmission of the value of truth and ways in which educators create commitments to truth, knowledge, and membership in fact-based and truth-valuing communities.Philosophical psychology: concerns about the relation of truth to self-examination, self-knowledge and self-deception; questions about relations between truth and affect, habit, will, and self-consciousness; and the issue of the role of truth in both psychological therapies and understandings of human flourishing.Politics: relations of truth to justice, legitimacy, law, freedom, vulnerability, violence, power, community, and cosmopolitanism; questions about the universality or plurality of truth or an individual's or a particular culture's truth; and issues related to constitutionalism, democracy, authoritarianism, and the possibility of “the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”These political concerns about the nature of truth make clear that truth is not simply a perennial philosophical topic but also one with pressing contemporary relevance and bite. The COVID-19 pandemic, for example, makes plain that many people do not believe in the truths of science, modern medicine, public health, and disease prevention. Black Lives Matter protests and demands reveal that a fundamental truth of many—far-reaching and systematic racism in the USA—to many other persons rings absolutely false—both as a claim about the country and as a diagnosis of themselves. Center stage in the current global rise of authoritarianism are leaders who do not value truth and who claim their own truths rooted in their own “alternate facts” and, frequently, violent suppression of information and opinion. Social media has so manipulated, segmented, and polarized its users that one group's truths now are another group's “fake news” and elaborate conspiracies. In inquiry, social life, government, and communications, now the need for truth, including an understanding of truth, is immense. In this context, the New York Times often and importantly has proclaimed that “Truth Matters.” Indeed. However, this is not simply a reminder or a call for courage but also, as William James saw, a research agenda: Just what is this truth that matters and how, for whom, and about what does it matter?The richly interwoven articles that follow take up these challenging questions. In “Truth, Nature, and Sellars's Myth of the Given,” Lawrence Cahoone sets forth a correspondence theory of truth that is thoroughly consistent with cognitive science and thoroughly naturalistic—fallibilistic (following Peirce), objectively relativistic (following Cohen, Morris, and Buchler), and emergentist in its understanding of human knowing as arising from nonhuman causal interactions. The success of a naturalistic correspondence theory, Cahoone argues, depends on the development of an effective response and rebuttal to Wilfrid Sellars's well-known “myth of the given” and his view that causal chains of sensation cannot have any epistemic function or status. The latter indeed can emerge from the former, Cahoone argues, even as it is impossible to reduce the latter to the former and even as it is impossible to phenomenologically describe the former from within the latter. Cahoone's naturalism and fallibilism are further developed by Mary Magada-Ward in “Neither Yours nor Mine but Ours: On the Communal Nature of Truth and Rational Belief.” Reaching truth, she argues, is a communal endeavor—it is not something I do or you do but, instead, something we do. A community of inquiry, however, does not just automatically arise or sustain itself. Its existence depends on the presence of particular social conditions and resources, and their absence can impede the realization of community. Here Magada-Ward focuses on the ways in which communities, and only communities, can overcome or at least mitigate the kinds of fear, anger, blame, disgust, and other emotions that undermine these communities themselves—and so undermine the realization of truth.Of course, powerful individuals and groups within communities may find that they can lie, uphold falsehoods, and deceive in ways they find rewarding. In such cases, what Santayana called the “mighty compulsion” of truth might not be felt. There may be no comeuppance for nontruth; the unexamined life may seem worth living; the imperative, “Know Thyself” may have no force for those with power, money, or luck. Drawing on both Peirce and Santayana, in “Does Truth Really Matter? Notes on a Crisis of Faith,” Jessica Wahman makes five major points about truth: a truth is not a fact but, instead, a description of facts; human truths are never comprehensive and complete but only relational, partial, and fallible; truth is objective and measured by what it is about rather than by who happens to hold it; accordingly, truths are not collectively held opinions—though, of course, a collective opinion may be true; and as such, truth itself is independent of human thought and nature, and so is a separate realm of being. As a result, Wahman concludes, human truths do matter and they require experimentation, meliorism, and the patience to hear and to tell everyone's story—perhaps a matter more for literature than for philosophy. This relation between truth and narratives—the stories we hear and tell or silence—is the focus of Scott Stroud's “The Complex Relationship among Truth, Argument, and Narrative.” What is the difference between a good narrative and a bad one, between a true story and a false one, between a narrative with argumentative force and one that lacks it? How could a narrative contain or warrant truth? In response to theorists who have argued that narratives cannot assert truth claims, Stroud sets forth a rhetorical account of narrative reasoning and narrative fidelity (drawing in part on the work of Walter Fisher) that stresses the extent to which a narrative coheres with prior narratives and one's own sense of identity. But if this is so, then how is any critique of a culture and its propaganda and entrenched narratives possible? How can there be “transcendent critique?” How can narrative truth check itself? How can it be, Stroud asks in conclusion, “fully corrigible?” Is the basis for the rejection of the truth claims of one narrative simply another, different narrative?This issue about the relation between truth and pluralism—narrative pluralism, epistemic pluralism, metaphysical pluralism—is the focus of John J. Stuhr's “Truth, Truths, and Pluralism.” Stuhr contextualizes this issue in terms of what he calls the contemporary war on truth and its new and distinctive sites, scope, and tactics. Drawing on specific examples, Stuhr shows how pluralism about truth has been co-opted by authoritarian and totalitarian political forces—forces that reduce pluralism to subjectivism. Rejecting the view that pluralism must be jettisoned in order to maintain a sufficiently robust account of truth, Stuhr sets forth a decidedly nonsubjectivist pluralist epistemic creed, and concludes by outlining four political responses to authoritarianism—an electoral strategy, a communications and media strategy, an educational strategy, and a strategy for social investment in the institutions that produce truths. Even collectively, Stuhr concludes, these strategies provide no sure guarantee of victory in the war on truth. April Flakne extends this set of concerns in her analysis of the ways in which not only individuals but also the “common sense” of whole communities can be complicit with and even advance and serve totalitarian conversion of facts into mere opinion by means of political lying. In her “Can Facts Survive?: Lies and the Complicity of Common Sense,” Flakne explains how new communications media and social science research methods advance the opinionization of facts in ways that may be far more effective than totalitarian ideology (that centrally concerned Hannah Arendt, for example) and in ways that cannot be prevented by common sense (that presupposes facts as fixed reference points). Flakne identifies a different, Aristotelian notion of common sense as in-the-making shared embodied perception—the coming to be of the common, the coming to be of a community of truth. How can or should this happen? In the title words of Hannah Kiri Gunn, “How Should We Build Epistemic Community?” Gunn analyzes this notion of epistemic community and the conditions upon which its existence depends, including functioning epistemic norms and commitment to the notion of rationality as moral responsibility as well as epistemic duty. Gunn stresses that individuals should take a community-oriented stance by responsible participation in epistemic, truth-seeking and trust-building communities and that they should regard their agency as relational rather than merely individual. Concluding that individuals must be accountable for actively upholding the value of truth and its pursuit by inquiry, Gunn emphasizes equally that communities must be conducive to, and inclusive of, individuals engaging in precisely this action. And this means that the individual pursuit of truth is never merely personal; epistemic agency requires an epistemic community of trust and respect—an ethics and politics of truth.Truth is a perennial topic in philosophy in large part because there is no one view of truth that most everyone takes to be true. As a theoretical problem, this may be merely disconcerting. As a practical problem, it is much more consequential. In this context, anyone who thinks hard about truth might recall William James's “A Word More About Truth”: My failure in making converts to my conception of truth seems, if I may judge by what I hear in conversation, almost complete. An ordinary philosopher would feel disheartened, and a common coleric sinner would curse God and die, after such a reception. But instead of taking counsel of despair, I make bold to vary my statements, in the faint hope that repeated droppings may wear upon the stone, and that my formulas may seem less obscure if surrounded by something more of a “mass” where by to apperceive them.2 In this spirit, the articles that follow, whether or not they make converts of all their readers, add mass in original and urgent ways to understanding the meaning, importance, and value of truth—surely one of philosophy's stones.